ltonian, and
yet troubled by a thrilling sorcery that Milton never knew--madden
the reader with anger that he never finished it; an anger which is
only increased when in that other "Version," the influence of Dante
becomes evident. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci!" Ah, there we find
him--there we await him--the poet of _the tragedy of bodily
craving,_ transferred, with all its aching, famished nerves, on to the
psychic plane!

For "La Belle Dame" is the Litany of the Beauty-Maniac--his
death-in-life Requiem, his eternal Dirge! Those who have ever met Her,
this "Lady in the mead, full-beautiful, a fairy-child," whose foot
"was light" and whose hair "was long" and whose eyes "were wild,"
will know--and only they--the meaning of "the starved lips, through
the gloom, with horrid warning, gaping wide"! And has the secret of
the gasping pause of that broken half-line, "where no birds sing,"
borrowed originally from poor Ophelia's despair, and echoed
wonderfully by Mr. Hardy in certain of his incomparable lyrics,
been conveyed to my reader?

But it is, of course, in his five great Odes, that Keats is most
supreme, most entirely, without question, the unapproachable artist.
Heaven forbid that I should shatter the sacred silence that such
things produce, by any profane repetition! They leave behind them,
every one of them, an echo, a vibration, a dying fall, leaving us
enchanted and trembling; as when we have been touched, before the
twittering of the birds at dawn, by the very fingers of Our Lady of
sweet Pain!

Is it possible that words, mere words, can work such miracles? Or
are they not words at all, but chalices and Holy graals, of human
passion, full of the life-blood, staining the lips that approach them
scarlet, of heart-drained pulse-wearied ravishment?

Certainly he has the touch, ineffable, final, absolute, of the supreme
Beauty. And over it all, over the ardours and ecstasies, hangs the
shadow of Death; and in the heart of it, an adder in the deep drugged
cup, coiled and waiting, the poisonous bite of incurable anguish! We
may stand mesmerized, spell-bound, amid "the hushed cool-rooted
flowers, fragrant-eyed" watching Psyche sleep. We may open those
"charmed magic casements" towards "the perilous foam." We may
linger with Ruth "sick for home amid the alien corn." We may gaze,
awed and hushed, at the dead, cold, little, mountain-built town,
"emptied of its folks"--We may "glut our sorrow on the morning
rose, or on th